Monday, 29 September 2014

Call off the search party, I’m still here. It’s just taken me a bit longer to return to
blogging than I expected.

It’s not that I’ve been lying disconsolately in bed,
surrounded by tear-sodden Kleenex and empty beer cans. Apart from that first Friday,
anyway. It’s just that when your
stock-in-trade is jokes, and you look in the Quality Street tin where you keep
them and find nothing but sarcasm, sweary words and barely suppressed rage,
it’s probably sensible to step back from comedy till the sense-of-humour fairy brings
fresh supplies.

For my own rehabilitation I have to thank one or two prominent
No campaigners whose patronising triumphalism stank out my Twitter timeline, swiftly
replacing gloom with anger and determination. Other grieving Yessers, even if
they body-swerved the social media wasps’ nest, were perhaps roused to
resistance by the BBC’s footage - only kiddin’, it was Russia Today’s - of
George Square being desecrated by sectarian wankers bent on mayhem.

However, as the dents in my filing cabinet testify, the path
to renewed optimism hasn’t been entirely smooth. After
all, for 1,617,989 of us the word “Clackmannanshire” will forever trigger
nightmares, as we recall our jaws clanking to the floor at the silent majority suddenly
materialising out of nowhere. I’m sure some
of us are still enveloped in a monochrome fog, surveying the popping-candy
vitality of the resurrected Yes movement with a mixture of bemusement and envy. Hang in there, folks, take as long as you
need to get your mojo back, and we’ll save you a seat at the coming firework
display.

Anyway, for the record, and to satisfy the thought police
hovering over my shoulder, I accept the referendum result. I acknowledge there’s a core group of people
who, for reasons ranging from respectable to ridiculous, will always vote No to
independence, even if scientists prove that it’ll transform Campbeltown Loch
into whisky.

And I won’t condemn anybody else who in good faith voted No,
although I hope Hell has a special barbecue setting for the duplicitous weasels
who lied to them on their TVs and doorsteps. When those voters’ expectations unravel like a
moth-eaten semmit, I’ll rely on Zen-like emotional control to reach out to them
with warmth and sympathy, rather than sand-blasting them with
colourfully-embroidered cries of “Told you so!”

Tip-toeing into controversial territory, and squeezing into
my Kevlar onesie for protection, I have to say that I disagree with claims that
the count was rigged. Small-scale
jiggery-pokery in Glasgow, a drama-queen fire alarm in Dundee and a notorious YouTube
video casting doubt on easily-explained activities don’t amount to wholesale
Government pauchling. Beady eyes from both camps, scrutinising every event from
the sorting of ballots to the scratching of bums, would make such a stunt
impossible to pull off, unless you kidnapped the entire count staff and
replaced them with clones of Derren Brown.

But, before I morph into a cheerleader for the Electoral
Commission, I’ve got one or two wee niggles. Firstly, control of the electoral
register at Glenrothes obviously fell into the hands of Mr Frank Spencer, as several
punters arrived at the polling place only to discover a bunch of spivs had
already voted in their name. Few observers considered this a surprise, given
the town’s fast-growing reputation as the Bermuda Triangle of fair
electioneering.

Secondly, cyberspace is awash with allegations that ballot papers
in some places were blank on the reverse, without the official bar-coding people
were expecting. Now, it’s quite possible
that (1) this doesn’t matter, because Big Brother knows best, (2) it’s merely a
public-spirited saving of ink in Austerity Britain, or (3) it’s the most widespread
example of false memory syndrome since half the population claimed they’d always
suspected the 1978 World Cup squad of being a bit rubbish. But, if the authorities want to see the 84% indyref
turnout repeated any time before the rocks melt with the sun, that sort of
thing deserves a decent explanation, not the bog-standard civil service
brush-off.

As for postal votes, I may be a vinegary old cynic, but aren’t
they simply a licence to cheat? I
preferred the days when they were reserved for those who genuinely needed them,
rather than being given away with copies of the Metro or dropped from helicopters on to a grateful populace. I’m
not griping about the referendum, where I’d say either postal voters behaved
themselves or both sides cheated equally, but this could be dynamite in a
closely-fought constituency with tactical voters on the prowl.

Ruth Davidson is probably fed up with the whole idea of postal
voting, having inadvertently stitched up the No campaign’s polling agents live
on TV by blabbing that they’d sampled ballot papers during verification checks.
Of course, sampling has been a widely-practised black art ever since homo
sapiens first won a slim majority over the Cro-Magnons, but because it’s the
electoral equivalent of insider dealing people normally have the sense to stay
schtum about it. Not so the hapless
Ruth, whose prefect’s badge is now at a decidedly un-jaunty angle as the Crown
Office polishes its knuckledusters. Edge-of-seat
entertainment to keep the Yes movement buoyed up in the coming days.

And it’s the coming days on which we must concentrate. Our
sneerier detractors would like nothing better than to see us mired in the past,
wide open to caricature as conspiracy theorists, tetchy losers and woad-wearing
fantasists. Sorry, perhaps there’s one
thing they’d like more: for us to shut our traps, chuck this political engagement
malarkey, melt our Yes badges down to make cereal bowls, settle down on the
sofa for the next 307 years and proudly join in the booing of Alex Salmond. Any
alternative activity, the irony-deaf Dalek voice screeches, is “anti-democratic”.

Bugger that. I don’t know if my ballot paper had a bar-code
on the back, but it certainly didn’t have the words “For Ever And Ever Amen”
beside the No option. We’re in the minority, and we don’t need a Professor
Branestawm lookalike on the telly to remind us, but it’s only two letters and an
episode of Westminster stupidity away from becoming a majority. We’ve got every
right to keep striving for that goal, and reason to believe we’ll find ears
willing to listen. This isn’t denial or bloody-mindedness, it’s a gravitational
pull.

Now is the time for everyone
to be politically engaged, no matter how they voted. Just ten days after the
referendum, “New powers for Scotland” has mysteriously become “Hey, what’s in
it for England?”, fracking operators are gearing up to shaft the Central Belt, knives
are being noisily sharpened for the Scottish budget, and we’re dropping bombs
on Iraq for the third time, yet again without the haziest clue what happens
next. Even if there’s no public appetite for another referendum, that little
lot should surely resonate with some No voters who can be persuaded to stand
alongside us.

I’m not particularly uptight about what we call ourselves,
though I have sympathy with those who think “the 45” is too exclusive, “45
rising” too Jacobite and “45 plus” too like an intelligence test for middle-aged
people. In these early days, it’s sometimes frustrating seeing energy being
wasted on “Judaean People’s Front” naming scuffles, but the wizened old sage in
me says these things have a habit of settling down and evolving naturally.

Personally, for the moment, I’m going with the “butterfly
rebellion” idea first suggested in Robin McAlpine’s brilliant article here. In
large numbers, butterflies are a near-impossible target for an opponent relying
on brute force. Individually, a
butterfly is colourful and attractive, and has a nifty set of wings just like
the sense-of-humour fairy.

Oh, and if it decides to flap those wings you never know
what hurricanes might result.

Wednesday, 17 September 2014

I’m sure we’d have preferred a nice bunch of flowers and a
candlelit dinner, but a Westminster Establishment schooled in the ways of the
military-industrial complex was never going to waste time on that
malarkey. Instead the wooing of Scotland
has turned out to be a half-arsed re-run of Operation Shock and Awe, leaving
our ears buzzing and the landscape glowing eerily like Dalgety Bay at twilight.

Until YouGov accidentally, or perhaps conveniently, snuck
out its poll result showing Yes nosing ahead, the London-based media were roughly
as familiar with campaign developments as a rhinoceros is with differential
calculus. This knowledge gap allowed a skip-load of debunked scare stories to be unleashed on us
again in zombie form, with broomsticks strategically inserted to prevent them
collapsing in a squidgy heap.

One of these was the beguiling notion that, at the first
sign of 5.3 million Scots taking charge of their own affairs, financial
institutions would with a screech of brakes vanish south of the border, replace
their Scottish employees with more expensive London ones and cheerfully start
paying Corporation Tax 3% higher than they needed to. BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson, temporarily
manifesting himself in Edinburgh like a peripatetic haemorrhoid, was the
principal mouthpiece for this.

Nick shares with the Prime Minister, and indeed many of our
imperial masters, the distinction of a PPE degree from Oxford, and is therefore
a man of unimpeachable probity. So
clearly there was no collusion when the Treasury inadvertently e-mailed him the
outcome of a Royal Bank of Scotland board meeting that hadn’t yet finished, and
no impropriety when he inaccurately pimped it on the airwaves before the stock
market had even opened. Purple-faced RBS investors, spitting out toast and
marmalade as they surveyed the share price in free fall, simply had to accept
the sacrifice for the good of the nation.

The truth, which was that a name-plate might move but jobs
would be unaffected, was no fun at all. So,
with a rush of blood to the head that somehow missed his brain, Nick decided
he’d better muddy the waters by heckling Alex Salmond at that day’s press
conference. This was, sadly, tantamount to taking on a master swordsman armed
only with a plastic knife and fork. The
embarrassing rout that ensued, to chortles of appreciation from the
international press corps, is - as you might imagine - unavailable on BBC
iPlayer, and will be fully expunged from history just as soon as Nick discovers
how to un-invent the Internet.

In the media's fantasy world, threatening to move name-plates southwards soon became the hot new
craze. Birds, bees and educated fleas were all
reported to be in Peckham, checking out cut-price Brasso suppliers. Lloyds Bank
was allegedly fired up and ready to go, until tiresome pedants pointed out that
its head office was already in London.

Equally gung-ho was Standard Life, although - without
wishing to be churlish - we’d heard the same thing from them back in March. And in 1997, before the devolution referendum. And, to be honest, any time in the last 189
years when the dreich weather had been getting on their tits, or the locals hadn’t been
giving them enough cringing respect, or they’d thought someone was looking at
them in a funny way.

A new, more blood-curdling threat was obviously needed. Step forward Deutsche Bank, recently fined
£4.7 million for inaccurate reporting of past events, but now touted by the
media as somehow able to predict the future without its audience busting a gut
laughing. It turned out that the bank’s
previous analysis of Scotland, in May 2014, had failed to take account of one
crucial fact: that UK Cabinet Minister
Sajid Javid, previously a Deutsche Bank board member, desperately needed a
favour from his old chums.

To the sound of principles crackling merrily on a bonfire,
the bank now fast-tracked a re-evaluation of Scotland’s prospects that was a
tad more pessimistic. It seemed they’d
analysed all the stupid things it was possible to do, including microwaving your
private parts, reversing a petrol tanker off Beachy Head and skinny-dipping
with a school of piranha fish, and reached the inescapable conclusion that
Scottish independence was the daftest of the lot. With absolutely nothing going for it but significant
wealth, outstanding natural resources, a highly-skilled population and a
reservoir of international goodwill, all a fledgling Scotland could look
forward to was another Great Depression, so the German equivalent of “yah boo
sucks” to the lot of us.

Meanwhile, Asda, John Lewis and M & S were reported as
saying that was all fine, but could they possibly introduce a bit of
hyper-inflation too? “Scottish
wheelbarrows will buckle under the weight of people’s everyday cash needs!” lamented
No campaigners from a carefully-prepared script, as the Morning Call switchboard burst into flames. “Alex Salmond has no Plan B for mass-manufacturing
reinforced axles!”

To add to the apocalyptic mood, Glasgow experienced a sudden
plague of Labour MPs, trolley-cases laden with bankrupt ideas, parading out of
Central Station and up Buchanan Street. They coalesced into one giant doughnut round
the statue of Donald Dewar, obediently chanted “Naw” as their soon-to-be-former
leader Ed Miliband cranked the platitude generator up to 11, and then, er, slunk
away again. The BBC, naturally, found
the experience so awe-inspiring that they vowed never to film on that spot
again, no matter how many Yes campaigners turned up.

The day-trip will be especially remembered for the visitors’
piss-taking welcome from a guy in a rickshaw, who serenaded their miserable
crocodile step by step with an amplified blast of the Star WarsImperial March. This rib-tickling episode highlighted the
value of music in politics, if only as a means of preserving the public’s sanity.

Any appearance by Cameron and Clegg would
surely be much improved if accompanied by the Laurel and Hardy theme. Lugubrious wind turbine Jim Murphy, nabob
of the expenses claim, deserves to have his harangues framed by a chorus of Money, Money, Money. And, particularly if Scotland votes Yes on
Thursday, shouldn’t Johann Lamont be permanently identified with Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now?

And so to the climactic payload of the week’s bombardment,
which arrived with an almighty squelch on the front page of Tuesday’s Record.
This was the three main Westminster party leaders’ galactic,
ground-breaking, oh-for-Pete’s-sake-not-again “VOW” to festoon Scotland with
sparkly but useless trinkets if we Do the Decent Thing.

Where to begin? Apart from the fact that the document is
signed by Nick Clegg, and therefore inherently risible, there’s the itsy-bitsy
problem that not a single MP outside Scotland has been consulted about it. Westminster is already awash with the sound
of knuckledusters being polished, and by the time the three stooges’
Sellotaped-together proposals come up for debate the atmosphere will be like a
Wild West saloon waiting for the first chair to be broken over someone’s head. I
Predict A Riot.

So here we are, folks.
The clock is ticking ever more loudly, and there’s no further outrageous
propaganda tarted up as humour I can sling at you. It's now up to you. Vote once, vote wisely, and be proud of the
choice you make.

Friday, 12 September 2014

While the next blog chapter is gently stewing in my brain, here’s a guest post from @HoppingHaggis, a call to arms reminding us that time is short and we still need to make things happen in the next six days!

I know, there are tons of people out there campaigning already, but if you haven’t yet dipped your toe in the water, this post is for you! Canvassing may or may not be your own cup of tea, but we can all do something, and it’ll be worth it to wake up the morning after and think “I was part of that.”

I’ve been canvassing for the first time, and it feels good!

It started with the rolling 24 hour party political broadcast at the start of the week. You know, even if it wasn’t complete tosh about losing the BBC, this latest stunt makes me question whether we even want them! Instead of getting angry, I decided to wrestle my trembles into submission and get out to chap some doors. I’ve never campaigned for anything before, and I’m quite a quiet person, so it was with some trepidation that I emailed Yes Forfar, but I got a speedy reply from a very nice lady who invited me to come out with them.

I’ve just returned, and I have to say I’m so glad I did it! We met in a wee car park and I was paired up with a friendly lady who worked at a local university. She quickly kitted me out in some Yes garb (I didn’t even have a badge!) and off we set. We had a list of registered voters to work from: the first few people were out, but our first answer was for a Yes. We gave him a sign to pop in his window, marked our sheet and moved on.

It was a good night: a couple of No’s, a couple of undecided and a lot of Yesses, but my favourite was an extremely friendly Russian lady who proudly told us she already had her signs in the window – it pleases my heart how inclusive this movement has been! Sure enough, when we walked round the corner of the block, we saw her window decked top to bottom with a big Yes Saltire.

When we finished our list, we headed back to the car park and met up to tally results (stopping to wave at the wee guy driving by, giving us a big thumbs up!) Our wee group got:

60% Yes

20% No

20% Don’t Know

So with the Don’t Knows removed, that’s 75% Yes!

Please, we have so little time left and EVERY VOTE COUNTS. I’m a fearty computer nerd at heart, I hate speaking to people, but this is SO important and we all need to make it happen. Even if you’ve never done it before, it’s not so hard - you just have to stand and smile. Everyone can stand and smile; you’ll enjoy it, it’s liberating!

If I can do it, then anyone can, and you’re needed. With something so important we can’t afford to be complacent.

People of Scotland, this is our time... Let’s make it happen.

Vote Yes!

@HoppingHaggis

PS: I asked William to post this for me on his blog, because his was one of the first blogs I ever read about independence 3 months (or so) ago and he drew me into the movement. A brilliant humorous writer, if you haven’t read his posts elsewhere on the blog, I would encourage you to have a look. Be prepared to giggle!

Thursday, 11 September 2014

Flying back from my holidays at the weekend, wondering if
the pilot would be able to avoid the clouds of volcanic pish spewing into the
atmosphere through the efforts of Jim Murphy, I was blissfully unaware of the
stushie that lay ahead. Thanks to a disastrous security lapse at YouGov, some truthful
indyref poll results had accidentally escaped into the public domain, sending a
ruddy great ferret up the trouser leg of the UK body politic.

In recognition of the national crisis, the BBC immediately
abandoned its commitment to impartiality, not that anyone noticed much
difference. Andrew Marr, his fingernails
glistening with red, white and blue varnish, invited George Osborne on to his
show to offer reassurance to the people, in so far as that’s possible for a creepy
cadaver with coal-black eyes and no reflection in any mirror.

There would be no currency union, no way, no how, not on
your nelly, re-iterated the Chancellor, sending sterling into a tailspin and
his speculator chums into froths of excitement. But, by sheer coincidence, and in
no way a colossal panicky bribe, this was the very week when the Unionist parties had been planning to announce some
really bitchin’ extra powers for Scotland if it voted No.

It wasn’t clear what these powers would entail, although enhanced
control of lightbulbs, pop-up toasters and the colour of men’s socks were just
some of the mouth-watering possibilities. But, whatever they turned out to be,
they’d make Scotland just the proudest subordinate region of a bankrupt, clapped-out
colonial power led by lying charlatans you ever did see!

Hang on, said some annoying swots who’d read the Edinburgh
Agreement, you can’t move the goalposts so close to the referendum, especially
when so many postal votes have already been cast. The Internet began gently to smoulder as
people Tweeted images of indignant e-mails they’d fired off to the Electoral
Commission, under the misapprehension that this august body was any more useful
than a wet wipe in a tsunami. They might
as well have written their messages on leaves and entrusted them to The Very
Hungry Caterpillar.

It rapidly became clear that any prohibition in the
Edinburgh Agreement on introducing faaaabulous new offers in the 28-day pre-referendum
“purdah” period didn’t apply in this case, because (1) the Agreement wasn’t a
proper treaty, suckers, just a wee pretendy scrap of paper signed by an
oleaginous, dish-faced Tory with his fingers crossed behind his back, and (2) the
three Unionist parties weren’t actually offering anything new, just the same unspecific
mouldy old toot as ever.

As the Yes camp hooted in derision, the Establishment showed
signs of being genuinely spooked. Alistair Darling, asserting to a slack-jawed
John Humphrys on Today that all was
going according to plan, had to be strapped into a life-size jelly mould so as
not to slide off his chair into an amorphous mass on the studio floor. A Royal foetus, usually a dead cert to
instigate a forelock-tugging epidemic, failed to lay a glove on the public
imagination, with Nicholas Witchell’s fawning adulation becoming an irrelevant
background drone. “10 DAYS TO SAVE THE
UNION!” chorused the vassal press, in 30-foot high letters composed mainly of
phlegm.

“Let’s publicly fly the Saltire everywhere, because that
sort of patronising bollocks never pisses off the Scots!” declared David
Cameron. But, alas, the Downing Street
pole was too greasy, and the flag fluttered disobligingly back to earth, in an
omen both sides immediately claimed as disastrous for the other. It was becoming increasingly hard to track
down Tory MPs, most of whom had scuttled down palatial gold-plated rabbit
holes. A human shield for the
Westminster establishment was clearly required – but who?

Only one man had all the necessary attributes: elephantine lack of self-awareness, delusional
faith in his own abilities and cast-iron certainty about the world, undisturbed
by trivial distractions such as facts. A man still hugely influential in
Scotland, according to BBC correspondents who either don’t get sarcasm or have
been speaking only to folk who spent 1997 to 2010 goat-herding in Patagonia. A fitting wearer of the “out-of-touch political
relic selling moonbeams to gullible peasants” mantle so infamously worn by Alec
Douglas Home in 1979.

Yes, Gordon Brown, his world-saving superhero costume
cunningly hidden under his trademark “sack of potatoes” suit, was back in the
limelight. Just as well, with sales of
his book ominously circling the toilet bowl. The BBC, whose standard-issue Sat-Nav had
previously been unable to distinguish Loanhead from Bhutan, loaded its top news
commentary talent into a fleet of articulated trucks and rumbled over the
border to give us wall-to-wall coverage of Gordon’s manoeuvres to foil the
insurgent natives.

We got Gavin Esler, who’d discovered the caterwauling Vote
No Borders teenagers but completely missed National Collective. Huw Edwards, who managed to conduct an entire
interview with Ian McDougall of Business For Scotland without apparently
twigging that the organisation supported Yes.
Robert Peston, bouncing up and down on his toes, either in eagerness to
deliver the latest economic smackdown or because the Calton Hill breeze knifing
through his loins made him want to pee. How
heartbreaking it would be for Scotland to lose access to such expertise through
the silly nonsense of self-determination!

The centrepiece of the media onslaught was Gordon’s Big
Announcement, which the Beeb marked with a 50-minute party political broadcast for
No that would have been the envy of any banana republic. Naturally, they reported that the great man’s
words were pearls, dropping as the gentle rain from heaven, and that it would
be unconscionably rude of Scots to reject such largesse from a generous,
forgiving UK Government. Of course, they’d
have been equally complimentary if he’d simply read out the takeaway menu from
the Rawalpindi Tandoori, and on reflection that would have been more
informative than what he actually said.

As you don’t need me to tell you, the whole palaver turned
out to be about nothing more than a timetable, which, as anyone knows if they’ve
ever been stranded on a platform with their nads freezing off, isn’t a great
deal of use. It would also be fair,
albeit uncharitable, to point out that not only does Gordon have no clothes,
but he isn’t even an emperor. Never
mind, we were told, the three main Westminster parties will endorse everything he
says, as long as it doesn’t involve anything concrete. And they’ll start the
meter running the very nanosecond after a No vote, assuming they aren’t too
busy flicking V-signs at us and orgiastically drowning each other in champagne.

At the end of October, presumably the next time Gordon intends
to bother showing up in the Commons, we’ll get a Progress Report,
with him pronouncing everything hunky-dory in the same tone he used for the knock-down
gold reserves and ravaged pension funds. In November we’ll get a White Paper,
which if the Unionist cabal has failed to reach consensus will no doubt be
covered in equally white writing. In
January there’ll be a massive Commons mutiny over the proposals, in March the remaining
few scraps will be sneeringly shredded by the House of Lords, and in May Nigel
Farage will be elected Prime Minister, with a mandate to ditch devolution entirely
and plunge us all into the abyss.

Not far away, but in reality a million miles, Nicola Sturgeon
was on the campaign trail in Glasgow, livin’ the high life with actor Alan
Cumming, who doesn’t have a vote - hey, neither does Dave, Ed or Nick - but is
a fervent Yes supporter. Amongst Alan’s
illustrious career highlights, as sad geeks like me know, is a role in the X-Men films as a teleporting mutant. The
character also has blue skin, pointy ears and a forked tail, but let’s not stretch
the metaphor too far.

There’s the whole shebang in a nutshell. In Loanhead, one superhero offering a vague timetable
to who-knows-where, subject to irritating small print, unpredictable revisions and
footnotes such as “Service may not run
after May 2015 in the event of utter bastards taking office”. In Glasgow, another superhero advocating the
chance for us to exercise our power and, in a puff of smoke, simply teleport ourselves
away wherever we want to go.

About Me

I'm a writer who returned to Scotland in 2013 after 30+ years in the Home Counties. If you enjoy reading my ramblings, please return often and recommend me to your friends on Twitter, Facebook and Planet Earth. That way someone may one day give me money to do this sort of thing, which would be nice.
william_duguid@hotmail.com